How do I import a whitespace-delimited text file into MySQL?

Question

I need to import largish (24MB) text files into a MySQL table. Each line looks like this:

1 1 0.008  0  0  0  0  0                                    

There are one or more spaces after each field, and the last field is tailed by about 36 spaces before the newline.

How do I import such a file into MySQL? From the documentation it seems that LOAD DATA expects all fields to be terminated by exactly the same string. I have tried

LOAD DATA INFILE 'filename' INTO TABLE mytable FIELDS TERMINATED BY ' ';

but MySQL will interpret a sequence of more than one space as delimiting an empty field.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you're on unix/linux then you can put it through sed.

open a terminal and type:

sed 's/ \+/ /g' thefile > thefile.new

this replaces all sequences of multiple spaces with one space.

Answer 2

If you're on Windows, just use Excel.

Excel will import a whitespace-delimited file (check the 'treat subsequent delimiters as one' box from the import menu).

Then you can simply save the file as a CSV from Excel and import into MySQL using:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'filename' INTO TABLE mytable FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',';